There’s this quote, from The Great Dictator:
To those who can hear me, I say – do not despair. The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed – the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress. The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish…
So long as men die, liberty will never perish. This is an idea that works for a variety of places to represent bad rulership, to show undying and unrelenting leaders. In Cobrin’Seil, I use places with undead rulership enough to give them their own technical name, that of a necrostate. A necrostate refers to a polity in which the ruler or ruling class is represented by the dead. In the real world, there is an extant necrostate (North Korea), but that’s ceremonial, in much the same way that a theocracy doesn’t need a real god to exist for the power to be situated in the hands of religious leadership.
But where dictators do not die, where the ruling class do not naturally cede power as human structural limits, can you form a reasonable, tolerable, culturally diverse and stable necrostate? How does something with an immortal, predatory ruling class get created and managed in a way that still creates a place where the people who live there are not in danger of permanent loss of life or exploitation, and what can sustain this kind of place over time? Is it possible to create a necrostate that, at least in the context of social and political structures, is not worse than places with things like noble orders?
What does that look like, and how do we get there?
In Cobrin’Seil, there are three necrostates I’ve discussed in public:
- Voolfardisworth, which is a classic Westerners-ideas-of-Romanian-Transylvanian culture, a full on Castlevania-em-up land of valleys with different vampire lords each trying to cook up the best vampire hunter to send out to other, nearby vampire lords, but not too nearby, and also, hopefully, with crucial weaknesses that they can exploit when that vampire hunter comes back home to clean up. This is to be a blunt metaphor for the way that nobility and landed gentry fundamentally treat people like commodies.
- The Osteon, which is an industrialised Victorian style nation where instead of relying on coal and whale oil, all the mass-production technology is based on constructs made out of human bones. This is to be a blunt metaphor for the way that early capitalism treats people like commodities.
- Uxaion, a venture capital necrocybermagepunk city with sprawling gangs and a very cruel vision of human capital, constantly trying the Most Exciting New Thing in an attempt to exploit a constantly flowing living population. This is to be a blunt metaphor for the way that late capitalism treats people like commodities.
Anyway, so like, if you go by this, in Cobrin’Seil, you might look at the setting and go: Okay, so necrostates are shit. Like the least bad of them is – well I don’t know, the least bad might be the Osteon or Voolfardisworth, but like, we can all agree that Uxaion is definitely the worst right? And I think that that represents a weakness in my worldbuilding. Uxiaon was made to be an explicit jab at silicon valley culture, and the other two are part of The Horror Peninsula, the Szudetken, where I wanted to give people places to make characters who could very clearly point to the world around them and go ‘I fight that.’ But that isn’t that I think necrostates are inherently bad, inasmuch as I don’t think, in a fantasy roleplaying setting, that it’s impossible to have organisational structures in general that don’t suck.
I want to make sure in Cobrin’Seil there are a few necrostates that manage to crest the lofty goal of ‘not blatantly evil’ and maybe even tap into the fantasy of like, what if we did have the dead around, what if there was a way that that was… not bad? From that impulse then there was the project of creating a space, and investigating it deeply, about a Necrostate that isn’t as simple as a place that sucks, and what a Necrostate that’s a good place to live is going to look like.
First of all, to understand the origin of this place, Hecsenfore, you need to understand the international legal system of the Eresh Protectorate, and the nature of Vampires in Cobrin’Seil. The Eresh Protectorate, I’ve written tons about that you can dig into that at your leisure. For now, the simple idea is the Eresh Protectorate is a set of interconnected city-states that hold a reasonably coherent, reliable and honestly, ‘good’ legal system that you have to comply to if you want to join.
Vampires are immortal undead beings that through a variety of different processes, come to subsist on stolen life force through a predatory means. They are very strong, they are very fast, they have some strange rules they have to live by. The typical Vampire is a monster that eats people and controls populations to eat them later over time. One of the things that Vampires tend to be unified around are extremely weirdo brains, with behaviour that, disconnected, look like strange archaic laws set up by storytellers.
In the context of Cobrin’Seil, the weird behaviours of Vampires are because when they die and become Vampires, the disconnect from normal biological life brings with it a lot of strength: they no longer need to eat or drink to sustain themselves, and therefore, whatever magic fills their bodies makes their bodies stronger. Thing is, this is also true of their minds – Vampires with small or subtle neurodivergent traits have those traits amplified to the nth degree. Every single Vampire shares some traits with autism spectrum, ADHD, and OCD, because the natural and normal anxiety responses that those effects often trigger are amplified in their minds. And just like people with those conditions, these are managed behaviours that individuals can learn about and take care of and don’t need them to be pathologised.
Vampires aren’t bad because of their brain worms. They are bad because they eat people. But they don’t have to, and from there we get the genesis of Hecsenfore. It starts with a single Vampire lord, considering the Eresh Protectorate. From the perspective of a long lived leader, the Eresh Protectorate are a fantastic deal for offering stability and long-term growth. They’re one of the longest lasting organisations, they have had no major revolutionary actions and their generally hands-off position towards their city states makes them excellent for trade and any special interests. There’s an entire Eresh city that feeds the protectorate pretty much nothing but sheep products, and if your special interest is things like ancient magical books or even just medicinal sciences, you probably can do worse than saddle your existing project to this body. Looks good.
But also, the Protectorate is a fantasy organisation based around the fantasy of ‘what if a country doesn’t have to suck shit’ and has a lot of competing factions that are, generally, holding different philosophies in a positive direction even if I don’t think that say, churches are great. But okay, point is, the Protectorate has a moral high ground to look at candidate cities to tell them whether or not to fuck off. They’ve told Uxaion, the hypercapitalist silicon valley undead land to go fuck themselves, for example. But they also have a standard of living and maintain that by doing things like ‘actually protecting people’ and ‘preventing revolution through abundance’. It’s a magical setting, the church can make food for people, a lot of problems can be handled with a central organisation.
Which means you can’t just sign up to join up because if you suck shit, they’re probably going to lose your paperwork, or tell you things you need to change to make the paperwork valid. Mostly, this doesn’t happen because people who know they can’t fulfill the requirements and meet the trade laws of the protectorate already can’t become members.
So imagine this like, Vampire, right.
Yes of course they’re hot. Really hot.
Big nerd, though, because again, that Vampire anxiety. They have a name, but it’s not important – you’re not going to meet Lochestow anywhere most of the time for the purpose of this conversation. You’re probably not going to hear him invoked either.
Anyway, so this vampire has a citadel, maybe they’ve even made it into a full blown city to start with. This citadel has the people in it they feed from, and art and literature and its own culture and you have a city, you have a thing and the Protectorate, over there, wants cities. Easy, then, they say something like:
hey, what laws do I have to follow to become part of the Protectorate, and how hard are those laws to set up?
There are trade and safety laws, those are almost all immaterial and unimpressive to this Vampire, which means they can probably comply with them really easily. They check them over and just get someone in the organisation of the citadel to just go ahead and enforce them. Make an enforcement department if they need that.
And they’re like uh okay but what about the murder one.
What?
There’s a law against murder?
well I mean, this vampire thinks, we don’t have to murder, we just have to drink blood. So… y’know, we just keep murders from happening. I mean murders can be illegal and we can still have people break a few laws.
Yeah but, the advisor points out, there’s kinda a bit of a concern here where we’re like, actual predators that eat people, maybe they might not consider us inherently trustworthy on the ‘we don’t do murders’ front?
And thus begins the slow, steady ratcheting towards a totally different moral perspective. Because most of the time a ruler – any ruler! – runs into a problem like this, that says the Protectorate’s standards will involve changing your life and the way you rule, they respond with something akin to ‘screw that, I don’t care about the Protectorate that badly.’
But this Vampire thinks of this as a problem, a puzzle. Something that can be solved. Just set things up so the Vampires don’t need to kill humans to feed. That’s a thing they can do, it’s just a matter of taking enough blood in the right time frame, and a population large enough can absorb that. And this is math, and Vampires love to do math. Well, some do.
Then there are corollaries, details, contingent situations. How do you keep people from being injured when you feed? Formalise the process, make it so there’s no need to struggle and Vampires only feed reasonable amounts. Oh hang on we have a thing for this, this can just be a tax. Make it so people can pay blood for their taxes. But wait, the response is, now there’s a problem where suddenly people are going to be squeezed for their taxes, this means destitution can be addressed with lifeblood, that’s going to be a problem, people exchanging money for blood, because blood can be exchanged for money. That means these regulations can’t allow that.
There needs to be caps on how much blood you can give, we need to regulate that, and if we need to regulate that, then we need to make sure nobody can double pay to go over their limit, okay, so, okay we have these blood drawers who take the blood, and that means we need a central reserve and control system for that, but that, that isn’t hard at all, and if we set that up right, that’s great, that’s a job, that’s a thing that we can have enduring and constantly work on, we love a project. But if we’re tracking these blood drawers we need to be able to track everyone in the city, and we need to make sure they’re healthy if they’re contributing blood and that means…
Look it’ll be easier, it’ll be tidier if we give the mortals universal health care. A few clerics as blood drawers, heal people and get pure blood, no need for hunts, no need for risk, and now if we just keep the population numbers high enough then we’re talking about a completely tenable situation. Then the next step is the protectorate presenting a problem where the numbers need to be dialled in. You need to make sure nobody is incentivised to kill someone else to donate blood. Okay, so fine, we have a guard system in place. Fine, the Protectorate want that anyway. Wait, that doesn’t address crime? What does? Oh, okay, okay, fine, fucking, so everyone has basic income, rent is free for basic housing, and that guard system group can be about enforcing and publically accounting these Best Vampire Practices. Oh, they can be seen as the way the non-Vampires show their investment in the good of the city too, call them the Stakeholders and then, somewhere in all this, somewhere along the line, this city starts to become a pretty cool place to live, if you’re someone who can, culturally, handle the vibes and recognise that every three months, you’re giving blood.
Then pivot across to the Protectorate. This looks sus as shit right? Like this vampire has basically started whole new systems inside their city and they’re now doing everything they can, OVERCORRECTING, really, and now they’re patiently building all these systems to make their city a valid Protectorate city.
Don’t know.
Don’t trust it.
Just, y’know, keep an eye on it.
What’s more, every time they send an investigatory team to this city, they come back remarking on how sure, it’s a bit weird looking, and they are absolutely drinking blood, but it’s fine. And that leads to further investigations into how good the mind control or illusion magic of the city must be because they keep getting these reports and they seem good and there needs to be an abundance of caution. The Protectorate are more likely to believe their investigators are mistaken or deceived than their actual finding.
For now.
And okay, now this vampire has the problem that they’ve fallen into the vampire trap of when an immortal, undying mind gets brain worms, those worms dig deep. Now, making this city good is their Special Interest Project. And that special interest project is obsessive, and has created its whole new layer of culture. Because to humans, this city is kinda gothic, has all these rad amenities, a creepy blood payment system, and the leadership is this small population of vampires that you obviously don’t want to fuck with and keep themselves removed and have like their own very distinct interests that shape bits of the cities. Like one group of the vampires are into art so their section of the city has a bunch of galleries. It’s interesting, it’s weird, but it’s also very free, very safe…
.. and from the Vampires perspective, this is a glass clock. The population must be over %, it must always reach high enough that they can always attest to Blood reserves and not run the risk of a starvation incident. New vampires arrive in the town thinking ‘this is a city run by vampires’ and aren’t expecting to walk into what amounts to the most intensely regulated minecraft farm ever made, and where every new vampire needs to be met with a commensurate increase in the overall population and oh, you can’t do that? You can’t bring enough people to safely continue the city project? Then you can leave or you can convince someone else to leave or, much more likely, you can disappear when you decide you don’t like how we do things here with our interlocking brainworms.
Another hallmark of what this city needs, is an antechamber. A place that is not actually part of this necrostate, but nearby enough that the necrostate can use it as a link point to the other nations that do not want to deal with a necrostate directly. In this case, the case of this city-state, that’s a little adjacent town, called Poinera. That town is going to wind up with a disproportionate importance, one of those funny little geographical details – like a tiny town which is regularly making huge deals for large sums of money or buying disproportionately large quantities of things since they plan on onselling them to people the seller won’t. This place wants to be a Protectorate city, too, but it’s also probably not a city, probably not ready to become part of the Protectorate yet.
Where we get then is a city that through sheer social pressures and response to systemic demands, has become a great place to live because if you’re detached from Wealth As A High Score, the actual project is interesting in and of itself. The Protectorate are convinced it’s sus because it looks too good to be true and the Vampire Monarch is obsessed with making it better because they’ve got the brain worm now and they have, coincidentally, become a beloved leader, blackhearted and selfish and entirely unprepared to cope with being one of the city’s favourite people.
They are a shepherd. You can shear a sheep many times, but skin it only once.
And they will fight the wolves.
This describes the process, the narrative of how a city-state like this can come to be. But what about this place, what about the place that does exist and how it formed? Then that’s the next part of the treatment. With the structure of the story, what follows is an examination of the city as it is – its name, its rulers, its culture and the places around the city that people are drawn to and why. This is where we get the project of the incredibly boring Vampire Lord Lochestow, who is if a Dentist’s Assistant became a Dracula, the way the city was named and titled, and what those details came to mean in the creation of the city state that is known now as Hecsenfore.